They told me that Halo 2 was far better than CE, and they were right!

But don't be fooled, actually, a better sequel doesn't mean it's good. It's just better than the first one.

Everything is better, besides story that i still doesn't understand a single thing. Gunplay, graphics, level design are a pretty good evolution from the boring ones from CE.

But there is one thing that made me love this game a lot: STEALTH. Yeah, now i can skip all the 95% useless fight and get straight to the relevant plot points. That said, Arbiter >>>>>>>>> Masterchief.

Masterchief is a curious one, because he is almost a silent protagonist, no problem in that, but everything he says is a EPIC BADASS PHRASE. That too is not bad, but he does talk enough to the point of being more funny than badass, and sometimes just "yeah yeah, you are badass i understood".

Well, the game did get better in the sequel, so Halo still has chance to redeem itself and this one leaves with a positive balance in the end.

When focused on more traditional closed shooter sections Halo is an almost alright game. The (few) enemy variety does not make that much difference since Master Chief Rambo is always rapidly firing those giant auto targeted aliens anyway. Likewise, the so praised AI, that I do not doubt that is very worked on, rarely ever shines due to how fast the pacing is, so one questions the importance of this “revolution” when the actual behavior of the enemies is way less charming than something much simpler like Doom enemies getting to fight between them (I’m assuming and hoping that the IA praise isn’t towards the dumb wheel eater allies). And comparing with Doom, remember the worst levels that consisted of big empty arenas full of enemies? That’s about half of Halo, but even worse somehow.

It’s funny to me that the advancements that this popularized in the genre that I perceive are exactly the things that I still find unconvincing after 20 years of iterations. The regenerative health not only causes what happens in almost any FPS ever of hiding behind a wall for a couple of seconds doing nothing, but in the way decreases the supposed greatness of the enemy intelligence as they are incapable of taking the vanguard on your most obvious state of crisis. Worse than that, it probably helped to popularize adding variety in shooting games by reducing the actual shooting with anything else that happens to be worse. I think what pisses me off the most is that the only thing mildly interesting in the combat, the constant movement due to the open space and enemy designs (even with a pretty standard movement), is completely tossed away by umm… the worst car that you will ever drive, a turret to shoot standing still while eating bullets, and something called a tank that in reality happens to be a giant hitbox amplifier since for some reason any bullet that hits the vehicle damages you directly.

Evolve combat? Sure, but please, not like this.